Influencer marketing has become a go-to method for businesses in recent years. Why? Because influencers can boost engagement, drive sales, and expand reach and visibility. They build genuine connections with their audiences, establish brands’ credibility in their industry and the list goes on.
Still, as their influence grows so can the potential risk of them getting involved in a scandalous act, like posting a piece of content that has a catastrophic effect on your brand’s reputation. Therefore, businesses must diligently analyze creators' content along with their audience, brand alignment, and crucial performance metrics.
This article will explore the reasons why brands must scrutinize influencers’ content to maintain brand safety, as well as list the various types of harmful content that present a danger to businesses. Lastly, we’ll offer a solution for checking creator content quickly and easily.
What Is Brand Safety in Marketing?
In a nutshell: it refers to maintaining your brand’s reputation. Brand safety is keeping your brand away from harmful content and placing your ads in a safe environment. In traditional marketing, this means placing brand ads in media outlets and programs that align with your company’s core values and audience. It entails sponsoring events and partnering with individuals who enhance positive brand association. Thirdly, it involves adjusting the content’s message and imagery to your brand’s ethos to ensure consistency and avoid alienating customers.
In influencer marketing, brands must consider all the above when they decide to collaborate with a creator. Remember, they will represent your brand, so you must make sure that their personality, opinions and ideas, style, tone, and content align with your business and your audience.
Why Should Brands Check Influencer Content?
Ensure value (and content) alignment
People are drawn to businesses and individuals who reflect their personal values. Hence, when an influencer’s content is in accordance with the company’s philosophy and vision, it supports brand identity and deepens consumers’ trust. However, when the creator’s content - including texts and images - is not related to the brand message that can cause confusion or worse adverse reactions among people. A careful content analysis ensures that the influencer’s persona and communication integrate well with the brand’s beliefs.
Protect brand reputation
An influencer’s harmful behavior - whether intentional or not - can negatively affect a brand’s prestige. One ill-mannered post published, a controversial video reshared in the past, or repulsive manners can damage years of carefully cultivated brand image in a moment. If people associate your brand with such content and conduct that may result in boycotts, public backlash, and negative PR.
Avoid legal risks
Influencers must adhere to advertising and disclosure regulations when they post sponsored content. Social media platforms have their own disclosure policies, plus businesses must follow local governing rules. Content evaluation will uncover influencers who fail to disclose paid partnerships and don’t comply with community guidelines.
Influencers may use the intellectual property of other individuals or entities without permission. Using copyrighted materials and trademarks can end in legal disputes if their usage is not authorized by the owner.
Maintain brand consistency
Brands put a lot of effort into preserving their messaging and voice across multiple channels. This is why people easily identify a company despite geographical, linguistic, and cultural differences. Once a brand starts working with an influencer, it must ensure the creator’s content complements their brand aesthetics and wording. Any deviation from the usual captions, terminology, and imagery will cause disarray among users and dilute the brand identity.
Safeguard future opportunities
Businesses often exist in an interconnected ecosystem of partnerships. Each brand painstakingly maintains its own public image, so partnering with a controversial influencer could strain existing business relationships. It can even result in contract termination, dissociation statements, and stepping away from future collaborations.
Consider internal relationships
Let’s not forget that your stakeholders' main focus is to keep brand integrity for the long term. Getting involved in a disastrous collaboration - even if it's a short-term one - can negatively affect your brand's reputation and decrease its stock value. Plus, your employees may also feel uncomfortable if their employer works with a compromising personality.
Types of Controversial Content
An influencer assessment should cover checking for numerous types of debatable content. Each of these can pose a risk to your brand’s reputation, thus avoid creators whose content includes any of these.
Discriminatory language/ Hate speech: Any content that uses belittling language or expresses prejudice against people or communities based on race, gender, ethnicity, religious and political beliefs, sexual orientation, and disability.
Misinformation: This includes conspiracy theories and fake news without solid evidence. We count here content that presents and spreads false information as facts.
Cyberbullying: Using online outlets to harass and intimidate others.
Promoting drug and alcohol usage: Content that encourages or glorifies drug and alcohol usage or misusage of prescription medications. Also, count here content that underplays the dangers of illegal substances or features intoxicated behavior.
Political extremism: Videos and posts supporting extremist ideologies, authoritarian regimes, and anti-democratic political views among others.
Explicit sexual content: Inappropriate and suggestive content. Sexual and pornographic imagery or discussion of sexual topics.
Violence: Graphic depiction of violent acts against humans and animals, self-harm included as well.
Checking Brand Safety with a Tool
Fortunately, influencer vetting is easy with an influencer or social media analytics tool. They provide you with ample information about influencers’ audience demographics, key performance indicators, estimated costs, follower anomalies, and brand mentions. Luckily, several of them offer content analysis features, like HypeAuditor’s Brand Safety Analysis tool.
Our tool evaluates an influencer’s content based on 9 markers, such as toxic and offensive content, alcohol, political and religious content, pranks, adult and crime-related content, and negative sentiments. When we detect any of the above-mentioned topics or bad language in the text and images uploaded by the influencer, we mark them as harmful.
This creator’s content displays toxic and offensive language. That can estrange a large segment of the audience.
Conclusion
Entrusting one person to represent your brand is a huge responsibility. Influencers’ content can significantly impact brand perception, whether positive or negative. What was considered to be acceptable today may be repulsive tomorrow. Businesses should prioritize brand safety and maintaining their reputation over gaining popularity in one audience group.
Ongoing content reviews should be, therefore, an integral part of a company’s influencer vetting procedure. A brand safety analysis enables businesses to maintain their hard-earned prestige and brand image and mitigate the risk of being involved in legal disputes. Furthermore, it protects their current business relationships and secures prospective partnerships with other companies.
Take the necessary steps to safeguard your brand’s reputation and introduce content assessments in your influencer analysis workflow!
